Tag: community

​People are noticing and commenting — from the Public Attorney’s Office in media statements to a broadcast journalist who interviewed me during the wake for Carl Angelo Arnaiz in Filipino: “Have you noticed that both Kian delos Santos and Carl Arnaiz’s mothers were OFWs (overseas Filipino workers)? Maybe we shouldn’t have mothers leaving to work overseas?”

The next day at the university, a dean at UP discussed the same issue with me, but expanded her concerns to include some of our students with serious mental health issues and she observed in all the cases she mentioned that the mothers were working overseas.

Indeed, the problem is not the mothers (or, women) leaving for work abroad, because with the masses the choice is often the devil or the deep blue sea ie. get a job that will at least provide basic needs for the family and where else is that but abroad, or stay and live without dignity like a sewer rat consequentially setting in motion a slow onset trauma among family members, but rather it is the lack of decent work right here, in the town or municipality and city the mothers or any jobseeker for that matter reside in, not 2,000 miles away, in the “big city” ie. Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, Metro Davao.

Today, the big news on TV is New Zealand opening it’s doors to 5,000 foreign workers, and to show how bright the beckoning light is from the land of Lord of the Rings, it was reported that a driver there stands to receive PHP150,000 monthly and an opportunity to bring in the family after a year. That figure here is in the range offered to senior executives, if not the head of office. This inequality begs the question, why couldn’t employers here pay the same fair price for the same skilled service rendered? Must Filipinos, women or men, mothers or fathers, leave their families years on end just so to receive what they deserve as workers? And we complain about human rights violations!

In Baguio City, a highly-urbanized city, classified ads are the most depressing section to look at. Week after week, for years, jobseekers who are mostly graduates of the several recognized universities here, will go nowhere with their future with “online English tutors”, “call center agents”, “frontdesk clerks”, “sales clerk”, “domestic helpers for Hongkong and Taiwan”, and the like. If it’s like this here, what about the provincial towns? Eh, putang ina talaga.

It is worse for men especially the unskilled, skilled but with no or limited demand for it, or those wanting to get a new skill. There’s TESDA, but if they’re from the masses, even the agency’s “minimal fee” is beyond their reach. So, in comes the women. With the women, they can fall back on DH or domestic helper that, abroad, more or less, rakes in PHP30,000 monthly. Compare that to at most PHP5,000 here (for same job, same skills set). Saan ka pa? But with the jobless men, thank you traditional views about gender, there’s no such thing as a male DH. Would guys go into it though?

In biology, there’s a topic on symbiotic relationships, one of which, commensalism, comes near to defining the relationship between the jobless frustrated male at home and the financially fulfilled focused female abroad. Commensalism is a type of relationship in which one benefits and the other is neither benefited or harmed. In other words, wala lang. The male who’s left at home is, obviously, the one benefitting. You’d think because he is, he’d happily take on the role of mother to the children. But the arc of the female OFW story doesn’t end happily ever after, for many. Men who are left behind, in the long term, oftentimes, become neglectful of their households including the children. Apparently, they’re taking a longer time coming to terms with their new role in the family.

It takes a village to raise a child. Spouses left behind by their partners who need to work abroad are in need of their communities’ support. But, what is community to today’s Filipinos? The answer is easy. The image that we are seeing now in government, national and local, reflects our new community: lying, cheating, power play, betrayal, looking the other way, one-uppance, laziness, planning for the next bright move, always looking out for mine, mine, and mine. Gone, particularly in urban communities, is the mindset of looking out for each other. No wonder the children are growing up on their own.

Bayanihan as the term suggests is about building community. The behavior shouldn’t be manifested only during disasters. It should be an intuitive act- for instance, a women’s or mothers group may want to go cook a whole day’s set of meals, say, on father’s or mother’s day, for that household whose mother/wife is abroad working. Or, the therapist in the neighborhood to volunteer some time to go visit households that have one spouse abroad in order to listen. Most of the time, people just need someone to listen, without judgment, to their inner selves, and after that, we’re OK and ready to face the world. This reminds me- once, I hugged my oh-so-tall son on the street, before sending him back (as he isn’t living with me). I haven’t seen him for the longest time and I missed him. I heard from a passer-by, surprisingly, a child, commenting that it’s very, very bad to have a relationship with a much younger guy di ba mommy? To which the mommy said, yes indeed it’s evil blah blah blah. Bayanihan can also be about not going into wholesale judgment about a person until you know all the facts.

Community is not built arguing about it in courtrooms or lecturing about it in the classrooms. We know most everything about it anyway. We just have to do. The Catholic Church (instead of joining in the rah-rah-rah which mostly rings hollow anyway) has a key role in inculcating this in Catholics through it’s Basic Ecclesial Communities. In the barangays, there’s the day care for young children, which, by the way, needs major upgrade in infrastructure and service. There’s also the barangay health center for psychosocial needs of families, which is also in need of overhaul. These, and several more, are facilities being paid for by taxpayers and to be taken advantage of therefore.

Ivanhoe was in a state of disrepair in 1988 when the Youngs had their first daughter. There were no curbs or sidewalks in the neighborhood, most of the streetlights were out, and potholes dotted the roadways. More threatening was the illegal activity – multiple drug houses on each bloc, with buying and selling out in the open, loud parties and music blaring at all times of the day, and regular gunfire.

The couple had to decide whether to stay in the neighborhood they had planned to just pass through. “We were torn between whether or not we should leave – and leaving really meant leaving them,” Yolanda recalls. “Like you were leaving your mother to handle all the problems that were happening.”

Alan credits the family’s Christian values for keeping them in Ivanhoe. They wanted to fight the feeling of hopelessness that was crippling their neighbors. So they met with the residents on their block to pray and discuss the chaos around them. They held prayer vigils outside of drug houses. They scheduled regular neighborhood cleanups.

“We thought, if we could clean up one block, would that perhaps make someone feel better and ignite a sense of hope?”

They also tried to put a face to Ivanhoe, meeting with police and city officials to show that there were families and others living in the neighborhood, not just drug dealers and gang members. “We said, we need you to help us help ourselves,” Alan recalls.

In 1997…the club he had started to organize his neighbors had spurred a network of 30 clubs throughout the 400-block neighborhood. That same year, the Youngs helped restart the local community group, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, with Alan as president and Yolanda as secretary.

Others started to take notice. A prominent local mortgage broker…offered to help – eventually donating hundreds of thousands of dollars so the neighborhood group could renovate the building that would becomes its hub. The Kauffman Foundation…connected Young with a working group at the University of Kansas, which helped devise a blueprint for Ivanhoe’s future, encompassing the wishes of dozens of residents. The community wrote down nearly 80 goals broken down into four broad categories: beautification; youth, family life, and education; economic development, housing, and jobs; and crime and safety. The Kauffman Foundation aided their efforts with a grant of more than $450,000 over three years.

…after being the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Kansas City, Ivanhoe is no longer in the top 10. And since 2000, it has closed more than 700 drug houses by identifying hotspots in the neighborhood and enlisting residents to keep a watchful eye. …one incident where police moved to close a house, and its owner fled out the back door, stashing drugs on an adjacent roof. A neighbor saw the whole thing and called the council members, who in turn called the cops, and the drugs were recovered.

Ivanhoe has come a long way since the Youngs bought their house in 1986. And although they still feel like there’s more work to be done, it’s hard to argue with their assessment that Ivanhoe residents once again have a sense of community.

“It’s the people in the neighborhood who are engaged and doing the things that good residents need to do that has brought about the progress that we have made… without that, you don’t successfully revitalize a community like this.”

This is what the Philippines need, in neighborhoods everywhere. For civil society to step up. By civil society, I mean people, not government, voluntarily stepping up to feel that they have some responsibility for the address of community issues hence act in order to help themselves and other people in their communities. Civil society is independent of government and people should not feel they have to always have the “blessing” of the Barangay Captain or the Mayor. Just do.

In a discussion with CBOs and officials in which I spoke of the independence of CBOs and for people in government to honor that, they looked at me like I was talking in Kanjiklubber. In the end though they realized the civic leadership vacuum in their communities. “Who should lead us then?” they asked me. I laughed. “That’s the question of the century,” I replied.

Also, previously, during a relief operation of a local NGO, I had been observing several displaced persons turned away by government workers behind the registration table because accordingly they had no IDs and weren’t in the list (government’s). My blood boiled but not so much as by those manning the registration table who assumed a haughty tone when they spoke to the displaced persons. I stopped myself from going over to people at the table- I was going to remind them again what HUMANITARIAN means. I went instead and spoke to the NGO director who was also at the table. My first words were, “whose operation is this?” To cut the story short, I reminded him of his organization’s independence which is critical for impartial delivery of relief. He watched me like I’d suddenly metamorphosed into Brawl but I guess he did think about what I said because he eventually went over to the government side and talked them into a better system. He avoided me afterward. Fine. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone for the rest of the day anyway (although in a corner of my mind I thought, as I always do in these situations, if he’s a true friend he’d get hurt but he’ll stick with me otherwise…ah, well, at least we’d know who our true friends are) was still burning when he treated us to pizza later that day- how could he just stood there and did nothing while government people talked down on war victims? I almost swallowed the whole pizza order just so there wouldn’t be any for him.

Oh. And, ‘doing’ doesn’t always have to be street demonstrations which has become for us in this country the equivalent of “people power”. How has it that when people are called to demonstrate, say, against anything Marcos they can be relied upon to show up and in style too but when you call on them to help sort the garbage, clean the village streets, donate for hospitalization of a sick neighbor, organize a Christmas party for poor children and the elderly, attend and speak up in community meetings, and the like, nobody shows up? As we can see with the Ivanhoe example, the real transformative power of the people lie in actually getting our knees and hands dirty day after day after day as we diligently face and faithfully solve problems in our neighborhoods.

The urban metropolis is a space in which one encounters “strangers” all around. Strangers are not “far away” and therefore beyond engagement. They occupy proximal space. Sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote in the mid-1800s, was intrigued with the combination of the Stranger and the Metropolis. According to Simmel, in order to live in the midst of strangers, people must cultivate a posture of indifference. You and I are able to occupy the same physical space, even to transact certain business dealings, without being required actually to engage one another–as long as we remain indifferent or blase. In an urban setting in which strangers are forced together indiscriminately, indifference is a civil response. The well-mannered person of the modern age knows just how much social and psychological distance to grant strangers. Too much engagement entreats a response from the Other, and this would be considered a violation of “their space” and poor conduct. This cultivated indifference is what Miss Manners might call the “cuticle” that guards against the friction of the proximity of strangers. It is indeed a civil response for modern society, but the effect of this indifference is a loss of face. We soon learn not to see the Other at all.